The Technical Side to Virtual Schools

Obviously, the technical side of creating an online school must be addressed before you roll out the program and begin enrolling students. Surprisingly, the choice of learning management systems was only briefly discussed. However, there are so many out there to choose from ranging from open source to commercially available, that even a school as successful as FLVS, who uses EduCate (?), can work with Moodle, Drupal, or SAKAI.

Help Desk/Support

Each district must account for volume in order to make this program work

volume of calls or service requests must not exceed the capabilities of your tech staff.

Interesting to see the numbers as they increase when a district adds a virtual element to their curriculum.

Hosting/Networking

Students and teachers, in addition to the course content needed at the inception of the class, will be creating content and data as the course moves through its progression. The problem of data security and integrity becomes an issue.

are you teachers virtual or not?

where are you storing your data?

is it safe and secure?

disaster recovery

you need to have definite plans for disaster recovery and to evaluate who is going to be hosting your student information

Communication/Hardware/Software

laptop

support

remote support

MS Office

Instructional team gets Dreamwaver

life-cycle of machines

VOIP Phones

calling students is essential to the success of the school, so VOIP works for this purpose.